I’ve never told this story to anyone.
Ten years ago I worked at a camp site in southern Colorado. It was not glamorous, mostly cleaning out camping spots, hauling in fire wood, and occasionally shouting at cars to slow down on the dirt trails to stop kicking up dust. It was during a particular low point of my life just out college, when I was really broke and in a bad spot with my family. I kept telling myself I just had to get through that summer and everything would be fine. Some part of me knew that was always a lie, but, hell, if you can’t lie to yourself sometimes then who can you lie to?
The funny thing about it was I never really liked the woods. I had a bad experience camping as a kid with my family. We were up near Yellowstone and I got stung by something I was allergic to. My entire leg swelled up like a red ham. On top of that my brother kept telling me stories of bears and mountain lions eating kids in that forest, so I spent the night just staring out the window, my leg throbbing in pain, waiting for something with bloody claws to leap out of the dark and chew me up.
The only reason then I took the job is because a sweet elderly couple named Carl and Jenna Townsend who worked summers managing sites for the local Forest Service. They were customers as a grocery store in Durango and could tell I was in a bad spot. Jenna mentioned they had an open role managing one of the camping sites and it paid better than filling sacks of other peoples food. She also said the mountain air would be good for me, and that I could camp out for free in a spare RV they already had up at this particular site.
So whenever anyone asks me then about that summer, I mention all the good stuff. The beautiful sunsets in that high altitude alpine air, the mostly friendly gaggles of families that rolled in from all over the country, and the money I saved that allowed me to move back down to Texas and get a real job. If they are really pushy I might share about the cougar incident, or the loud truck from Oklahoma full of neo-Nazis who blasted terrible rock music at nights and threatened myself and several other campers with rifles when confronted.
But I won’t tell them about what occurred on the night of June 20th. I’m only telling you because it might happen again.
I knew it was June 20th because one of the campers, a bright hippyish girl from Santa Fe, told me it was the summer solstice. It was the shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, which meant it was the peak of summer before the days began growing shorter again through December. She was studying Indian petroglyphs in the region which were based on the solstice, and asked me if I wanted to join. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than that so I gently declined, but her excitement about this particular date stuck with me.
When the sun began to set that evening I noted it was pretty late, maybe around 10 o’clock at night. All of the campers in the site had arrived for the night except one, so I was already back in my RV reading a book. The evening was strangely quiet, no loud kids on bikes or revving engines for once. Then, all at once, it became completely dark outside.
I closed my book pulling back the curtains. The night sky outside was pitch black. It was almost as if someone had hit a switch - from dwindling evening sunlight to complete darkness. There hadn’t been any sort of twilight at all.
This didn’t strike me as especially odd, as it was already past 10 at night so it made sense to be night time. But even so I felt an off tingle between my shoulders. Something felt off, in how quickly it happened, in how dark it was now.
I decided to do my single night sweep of the camp site now that I was already on edge. I opened the RV door and stepped outside, when I felt the feeling of oddness grow more pronounced. The air felt… off, as if it had stopped moving. There was no breeze, no usual mountain night time coolness. It didn’t fell hot or cold in fact. It felt like stepping into a vacuum.
The second strange thing was how absolutely dark it was. This was occurring during a new moon wane, so the previous few nights had been darker than usual as well. But looking up I couldn’t see a single star in the sky. Even more disturbing the light from my RV didn’t seem to properly seep across the area around it. It seemed to stop dead, a few feet from the source, leaving the forest outside looking like formless void.
And the final odd thing was the complete lack of sound. There is always a sound in the summer mountains, especially at night. Bugs chirping, birds cooing, sounds of campers getting ready for bed. But that night I heard nothing outside of my own rustling. The cumulative effect was I was struck by the sudden, horrific certainty that right at that moment I was the only person on this entire mountain, or, maybe, in the entire world.
There are many things a person might do when finding themselves in such an unsettling situation, but the one I went with was the shout out, “Hello!”
No one responded.
I leapt back into the RV to grab my phone and a lamplight, panic seizing me. My phone had no connection, but the lamplight worked. I flicked it on and jumped back outside, walking to the nearest camp site next to me. There I saw a parked RV with a Florida license plate, the same one belonging to the Masterson family I had checked in five hours before. But there were no Mastersons around. The RV sat in the still darkness, only revealing itself when I waved the lamplight directly over it.
“Hello? Mr. and Ms. Ms. Masterson?” I called out again. I noticed the dark around me seemed to swallow the sound. No one responded. I hurried on, along the dirt driving trail, to each site. They were equally as still and empty, as if all the people on the mountain except myself had simply vanished all at once.
I was growing frantic now, running, tears forming on the edges of my eyes. And as my mental state got my scared, I noticed for the first time I could see other things inside the dark that surrounded me.
At first I thought they were tears. Little creases in the dark that ran like veins or roots across the greater whole. They had a slight glow to them, like luminous paint under black light. At first I wasn’t sure I even saw them, but the more I raced through the camp the more clearly I saw them.
By now I had circled back to my RV and was considering what to do next. What would make the most sense would be to get in my car and drive down the mountain to the main camp site run by Carl and Jenna Townsend. Except… some fear stayed me. What if I drove down there, and found the exact same thing? No people, no movement, no sound. Just me. All alone on this empty mountain. Forever.
I sat down, realizing the little glowing tears were growing larger. I leaned in, staring at them, finding them beautiful in a way. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen them before. They were all around me, all around the forest, and camp sites, and my RV. They were in the walls. I wanted to keep looking at them, so I flicked off all the lights in the RV.
And I realized they weren’t tears at all. They were… moving. Squirming, like worms. They were in everything, on everything, alive somehow. And something, somewhere, was pushing at them, like a kid picking at a scab. I could feel its presence now, surprised I had never been aware of it before. It felt big, much bigger than the mountain I was sitting on, its true enormity much larger than my mind could comprehend.
I reached out, foolishly, trying to catch the glowing worms in my hand. I grasped, my hand floating through them, when I suddenly felt myself latched onto something like a fish on a hook. It yanked at me and I was helpless. I was no longer in the RV or the San Juan mountains at all. I was in someplace not real, an Un-Real, and I could see things as it drug me along.
It was a place of shapes and void. There was darkness and light, but also something different than both. Nothing had the forms we might be able to identify in this world. It was another world entirely, with an entirely different dimensional logic. I would probably have gone insane, except it happened too fast for me to really take in any of it. All I knew for certain was that I was a very, very small thing dangling near the jaws of a much larger thing.
What saved me was a simple thought - I’m still in the RV. I was convinced, certain, on some foundational level that I was not on this other plane. I was somehow physically still where it started, in the safe little hovel I had found myself in for the summer by chance thanks to the kindness of two strangers. And it was certainty in my own mind which saved me.
The Un-Real vanished, right before whatever had reeled me in could start to consume. And sure enough I fond myself back in the RV. Not just where I was before, but how it was before. I flopped off my bed, in messy sweat, and saw it was no longer pitch black outside. The mountain sky was in the midst of purple twilight.
I walked outside, shaking, and saw the Masterson kids playing right outside. I smelt campfires cooking all across the site, and could hear the normal settling sounds of night time rolling in. I tried to get my head around what I had experienced, but it seemed like babble now. I nearly wondered if I had drifted off to sleep and if it had been a particularly awful dream.
Except, I looked down at my hand, where I had touched the glowing, squirming worm mass. It was red and swollen, just as my leg had been all those years ago. And I remembered then something I had forgotten as a child, that it hadn’t been a bug that had stung me at all. I had kicked at something glowing, pulsing in the woods.
That day I gently drove down to see Carl and Jenna and apologetically asked to resign. I told them I was having too many bad dreams up in the mountains all alone, and they seemed to understand. I moved back to the Dallas area, and made it a rule to not spend nights in too quiet or too isolated areas. The loud city life has then been good to me.
Until… well, in the last few months I’ve started seeing them again. Wiggling, grappling in the night. On my bedroom walls. My bed. On my skin. And I feel it again, that great hulking mass, that thing trying to push through this veil of darkness from some other side. This past summer solstice was particularly bad again, and one day, I’m certain, it will find some way to reel me in as it has tried in the past. And I won’t be able to stop it.
So please be careful when you go out tonight. And every night. Especially on nights when the wall between the worlds is weakened by the pivots of our Earth. Don’t sleep alone. And if you see those glowing creases, do not reach out. Stay here, in this realm, safe and sound.